Flight Time

All the commotion over at Teterboro Airport in the past year—two plane crashes in a month, and, after one, the F.A.A.’s censuring an air-traffic controller for making dead-cat jokes—has obscured the fact that Teterboro, aside from being the oldest operating airport in the New York area, is home to America’s first state aviation hall of fame. The other day, Shea Oakley, the hall’s executive director, was wrapping up the annual Teterboro air expo. As usual, the show, owing to its proximity to Newark Airport, was primarily on the ground. “Our air show is mostly a static air show,” Oakley said. One notable plane that did not fly was the B-25, a Second World War bomber (like the one that hit the Empire State Building, in 1945) with Wright R-2600 engines, likely built in New Jersey. “It’s a sound that makes an aviation enthusiast weak in the knees,” Oakley said.

A few days before the expo, Suzanne Haller, Oakley’s assistant and the other member of the staff of the Aviation Hall of Fame and Museum of New Jersey, answered a question from a young boy (“Is the giant airplane open?”) and then played the museum’s video, a Jersey-centered version of aviation history. In this telling, the 1793 Deptford, New Jersey, landing of a hot-air balloon is given primacy over the Philadelphia launch of the same balloon; the 1909 fixed-wing flight by the Boland Brothers, of Rahway, gets good screen time, the 1903 Wright Brothers flight does not. Other flying Jerseyites mentioned include the Hackensack native Walter Schirra, the only astronaut to fly in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs; and the Montclair-born Buzz Aldrin, the first New Jersey native to walk on the moon. “New Jersey’s over two-hundred-year history of aviation is unsurpassed by any state,” a voice-over declared. Afterward, Oakley said, “The first identical twins in space, Scott and Mark Kelly, are from New Jersey.”

Oakley, who is forty-one, directs questions regarding the history of the museum itself to H. V. Pat Reilly, its founder. Reilly, reached by phone at home in Oradell, traced the museum’s origin to a dinner in 1970, when, while doing P.R. for the airport, he met Clarence Chamberlin, the second person to cross the Atlantic to mainland Europe, two weeks after Charles Lindbergh, in a plane built in Paterson.

“Chamberlin flew farther than Lindbergh and he flew longer, but nobody remembered him, because people don’t remember people who come in second,” Reilly said. Two years later, Reilly opened a Teterboro-specific museum. Then he began accepting exhibits from around New Jersey, such as the Gloria, a rocket-mail plane said to be the first one fired between states (across Greenwood Lake, on the New York–New Jersey border, in an attempt to speed up interstate mail).

The Gloria was acquired serendipitously, like much of the collection. “A guy that was up at Greenwood Lake, he came down and said, ‘I’ve got this thing if you want it,’ ” Reilly recalled. It hangs in the museum’s Great Room, near two chunks of the Hindenburg, which burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and a B-52 ejection seat, on loan from the Belleville-based ejection-seat collection of Vincent Menza. Around the corner is the Hall of Fame, a room lined with bronzed plaques honoring people who flew in, over, or near New Jersey. “If they are alive and they are willing, they are inducted,” Oakley said, at the museum.

Oakley gave a quick tour, showing off the world’s first electronic flight simulator (Carlstadt) and an early hovercraft (Sussex). Upstairs, you could hear the real Teterboro flight tower broadcasting live. Outside, as several airplanes landed, Oakley showed off a “M*A*S*H” exhibit of trucks and helicopters. “Our feeling is that we need to be more Jersey-related, so ‘M*A*S*H’ will stay, but in a reduced form,” he said.

In his office, Oakley spoke of having been a flight enthusiast since childhood. “I cannot remember a time before my interest,” he once told the museum’s newsletter, Propwash. He doesn’t have a pilot’s license, but he has kept a personal flight log since his first time in the air, as an infant, when his father gave him a Junior Jet Club logbook for a flight to Bermuda and had the captain date and sign it. “I’ve logged virtually every flight since 1968,” he said. A while ago, he was checking his logs and noticed that a plane he had once flown in had subsequently crashed near New Orleans. Another was a United Airlines plane, N612UA, which, he suddenly realized, crashed into the World Trade Center, on September 11th. “I was cross-checking,” he said, “and I noticed this.” ♦

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